It’s often an underlooked decision, how you buy technology impacts the buyer and seller and can mean your incentives are at odds.

For example, if it’s a percentage of ad spend. The technology provider is incentivized for ad spend to go up. For the brand they’re incentivized to begin picking and choosing what spend gets access.

A marketers technology selection is a reflection of their approach to the market. Their time is too precious to be adjusting the tech stack every quarter. If something is important, smart marketers align those incentives with the provider through SAAS. A fixed investment with incentives for investment from both parties to drive the agreed outcomes.

This is the best long term model hands down.

Notable stories this week

Vice to cut headcount by 15% with an expected loss of $50m this year. Related, Disney marks their $400m investment in Vice down $157m, implying a valuation of $2.5b.

23andMe launched a brand partnership with The Grinch, Digg covers it. I think though, it’s a smart play for helping making DNA testing more accessible. Albeit a little strange.

Revenue in Q3 for The Trade Desk was $118.8m, revenue YTD is $316m, that’s a 54% YoY growth.

Enjoyed this riff from John Battelle on how we need to do better, be proactive, reduce waste.

“Overwhelmingly, marketers want a mix of long and short term results (85%). Because the studies show putting money into your brand and looking at a longer term trajectory means your brand can grow and will have a high value"…..“But 48 per cent are measuring only short term. We need to be thinking about campaign strategy and deciding what to measure at that point, and not leaving it until the last moment. There needs to be way more strategy about what we are doing, and why." –Jane Ostler, Global Head of Media Insights, Kantar

Datapoints of note

In an October 2018 survey by Ascend2 of 145 marketers worldwide, more than half of respondents said that integrating disparate systems was a challenging barrier in developing a successful strategy for utilizing marketing technology.

65% of respondents have increasing marketing ROI as a leading priority, followed by improving efficiency at 57% and attributing revenue to marketing (39%).

6 in 10 of client side marketers pay under $10k for branded content distribution on an average campaign.